1. THE BENEFITS OF TEACHING

The primary reason you teach is to educate the students. It is important to keep in mind that there is a serious reason for you to teach. The pleasure and satisfaction you get from teaching is a benefit in itself. To move a whole class forward in understanding a concept is a rewarding experience. Also, you will undoubtedly have a greater understanding of anything you have to teach. The preparations you make for the class will provoke a deeper understanding of the material. The students themselves will challenge and question you; interacting with students will only enhances your understanding of the material. As well, teaching will cause you to develop your own communication skills--skills that are crucial in maintaining your position in the academic community.

As with most things in life, everything comes at a cost. Your real cost for teaching is the enormous amount of time and energy it takes. You can put as much time and energy as you possibly have into teaching and you will still feel as if you could put in more. Of course, this phenomenon will occur in your research endeavors too. Remember, you must find a balance that works for you. You can minimize the cost and maximize the benefits of teaching by teaching courses of interest to you--ones that will motivate you to put in the time and energy that you need and that will reward you with a deeper understanding of the subject. It is really important to take note: teaching is usually not rewarded externally commensurate with the effort that it requires. Therefore, if you cannot find some internal satisfaction from teaching, the best course of action may be to reevaluate your career options.

2. LEARNING: PROCESS & THE IMPACT OF PERSONALITY

2.1 HOW STUDENTS LEARN

Three things happen when people learn. First, the student receives information. The student is exposed to a variety of external stimuli--not only do they get your lecture, but they hear the birds singing outside too. Then the student has to selectively process this information. Lastly, the student needs to understand. The student already has some form of a knowledge framework. This framework expands when the student takes in new content and either adds to the framework or modifies it to accommodate the new information.

There are two paradigms of what a learner is. The paradigm you choose will directly affect how you teach. Do you view the good student or learner as a vessel to be filled, or as a live wire--someone who is in charge of his/her own learning, but needs to be grounded? The vessel requires you to fill in the missing or empty area with information. The focus for teaching within this paradigm is on content and the view of yourself as an expert. The live wire model is one of empowerment--you are in charge of activating their learning, not of cramming information into the students' heads. The focus of this teaching is on the process--what can you do, how can you set up a process where their desire and their own self-motivation to learn will be activated? You have the sense that students are constructing their own knowledge in this model, as opposed to digesting your own preconceived framework of knowledge. In science some models of thought have been in place for hundreds of years. In these cases it is appropriate that we give the students the chunks of knowledge as per the first paradigm. But in most cases, if you want real learning to take place, the second paradigm will apply. There have been a number of psychological and educational studies done on how people learn. In particular, it is believed that students view the world based on certain general structures, i.e., there is a framework that the student tries to fit everything into. In addition, these structures change over time in a fairly well understood pattern. Where your students are and what structure they're dealing with at that point in their lives will affect how they interpret and how they perceive things that you tell them. Also, students won't always move willingly from one structure to the next. Thus it's important to know where they are and to always push them to move forward.

2.1.1 LEARNING STRUCTURES ADAPTED FROM FORMS OF INTELLECTUAL AND ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE COLLEGE YEARS, BY WILLIAM G. PERRYM

The first structure is when people see the world in a binary type of mode. Things are either right and therefore good, or they are wrong and therefore bad. Students in this structure feel that, as the teacher, you're the one who knows the right answers so your job is to teach those answers to the students and then it's the student's job to remember them. As an example, you may be giving a lecture where you're going off on an interesting tangent to motivate the class and you see a hand go up. You think,"Great, they're interested in this," but the question is,"Is this going to be on the test?" This question can be demoralizing because it seems the students are not really interested in what you're talking about. But if you can remember that the reason you're getting asked that question is because the student is working within this first structure, you can more effectively deal with the question--and the students themselves. This is typical of your first-year students.

In the second year of college, students usually move into the next structure: perceiving diversity of opinion. For example, a student in your class hears you say one thing on a certain topic, when a teacher in a previous class said something different. The students start to catch on that different people tell them different things but they don't have the depth of understanding yet to realize that things are different in different contexts. They will usually attribute hearing the different opinions to either 1, the teacher is unqualified and doesn't know what's going on--whereby they become antagonistic, or 2, they think,"Oh, I get it. They're just testing us. This is an exercise and we have to find the right answer." In either case the student is adhering to the idea that there is one "correct" answer, and that it is their job to find it.

The third structure is where students start accepting that diversity of opinion and general uncertainty is legitimate--that it actually exists and will continue to exist. As an example of the students' behavior from within this structure, consider the test question,"Which is the best sorting algorithm to use in the following situation?" In class, you have covered a few sorts and talked about how they work. You want students to look at the pros and cons of the different sorting algorithms in relation to how each would fit with the example scenario you have posed and to make a decision. That is not what the students are likely to do while in this structure. They know they're supposed to justify their answer but they don't know what the grading standards are. So they try to write everything they can think of about sorts. A better strategy is to try and structure your questions, as well as your general dealings with the students, to try to force them to address the differences.

Eventually, students will move into the fourth structure where they start perceiving all knowledge and values (including the authority's) as contextual and relativistic. For many people, this is when college life really becomes exciting--when you start understanding that everybody has different opinions that are based on where they're coming from. In particular, this is when your students finally start understanding--not just that they're supposed to say,"It depends,"--but why that is often the correct answer.

2.2 PERSONALITY, LEARNING, & THE MYERS-BRIGGS TEST

The Myers-Briggs personality test is one fairly simple model that describes learning styles. It organizes traits of people which affect how they learn into five different dimensions: sensory/intuitive, visual/verbal, inductive/deductive, active/reflexive, and sequential/global.

2.2.1 SENSORY/INTUITIVE

How do you perceive things? A sensory person needs to see, hear, and touch people. Sensory people are likely to be more practical than innovative. They like solving problems by accepted, standard methods. Intuitive people, on the other hand, like abstractions, possibilities, and hunches. They like innovation.

2.2.2 VISUAL/VERBAL

How do you prefer to input information? People who are visual like the use of pictures, diagrams, and symbols to explain concepts. Verbal people can take in written and spoken words more easily. People, in general, can input information both ways, but most people have a preference.

2.2.3 INDUCTIVE/DEDUCTIVE

How do you organize information? Inductive people observe, take data, and infer the rules of the subject. They like to derive principle from empirical data. Deductive people start with the rules and principles and use those to analyze specific cases.

2.2.4 ACTIVE/REFLEXIVE

The active person is a kinetic, hands-on learner. Active people need to be doing something in order to understand. These are the people who think and talk out loud. They love to work in groups because there is a lot of action going on. Reflexive people hold back a little, take everything in, and try to figure things out on their own. Group work may make reflexive people nervous because they want to reflect upon and have a full understanding of the concepts, though they are conscious that the other members of the group may have already reached a satisfactory level of comprehension and moved on.

2.2.5 SEQUENTIAL/GLOBAL

How do you actually come to an understanding? Sequential learners learn one step at a time. Skipping a step will confuse them. These are the people who do great on quizzes and study one chapter at a time but might not do as well on the final because they haven't connected the concepts. They are good at analysis and convergent thinking. Global learners grab a big chunk of the material and see the big picture. The global learner might appear slow and do poorly on quizzes, then surprise you by acing the final exam by pulling together all of the various concepts into one comprehensive whole. They tend to think divergently and can research well.

Of course, you cannot tailor your courses to meet the needs of every combination of these traits, but you will teach more effectively if you are aware of and are sensitive to how these traits impact learning.

3. NEEDS OF STUDENTS

Students come in all shapes and sizes--from at-risk to the exceptional, male and female, multicultural. And, in particular, as you finish graduate school your peers are a very select group of computer scientists--informed and knowledgeable people, as opposed to comparatively ingenuous undergraduates. You have to work on trying to meet all of these different needs; as an educator, your job is to educate the people taking your class without just pushing the exceptional students through the program. It isn't easy to do but you should at least recognize that and be prepared to work on it.

One way to do this is to distinguish what you can do from what is fair to do to help students. Usually enough time and effort will help out most students, but is this really fair to you, the student, and the rest of the class? Consider this question so that you know how far you should go to help someone out.

Get feedback from your students to find out directly what their needs are. In order to teach the class effectively, you must find out how the students are taking in your performance. Have your methods worked? You need to know if your students need you to take a different approach. A way to get feedback as well as student involvement is to organize a student management team. Choose a small group of volunteers from your class that are willing to meet with you once a week to review the course and lecture. Such a group would be particularly effective in a larger class, where student feedback might not be as immediate as it would be in a smaller class.

Be accessible to your students. Keep regular office hours. This helps students know when they can get help, and it discourages students from thinking you're on call 24 hours a day. Giving out your email address is another form of accessibility. Something as simple as smiling now and then can have a major impact on how the students respond to you. And refrain from making sarcastic comments; someone is bound to take it the wrong way.

Have a syllabus prepared. A syllabus should outline clearly what your expectations for the students are and what their obligations are. A tentative scheduling of the exams and multi-week assignments should be listed. With this syllabus the students can better ascertain whether or not they can meet the requirements of the class and balance your class's obligations with their obligations to their other classes, work, and other various concerns.

Find out what's going on in your own university about tutoring options available to students--sometimes there are classes for English and writing. If you have students who write poorly you can send them off to such a class.

4. TEACHING STRATEGIES

4.1 BASIC STRATEGIES

Be aware of what factors you can influence in the classroom. Students will bring different cultural perspectives, intelligence levels, aptitudes, attitudes, emotional problems, etc. to the classroom. Some interested students are not adequately prepared to tackle the field. You cannot affect any of these factors. Your influence in the classroom lies in the dynamics of that classroom and not in external, personal issues that the students have.

A natural tendency in teaching is to try to emulate teachers that you thought were really good. One reason you felt they were so good was because the style they used worked well for you to learn things. As a teacher, you have to recognize that students will have a variety of learning strategies and they will not all learn well using your personal learning strategy. The key is to recognize that students in your classes will have different learning strategies. Therefore it is most effective if you can provide a variety of learning situations for them. Try to remember different methods and styles used in classes you took as a student; things that didn't work for you but still might work great for somebody else.

Another teaching strategy is to include repetition of concepts but via different experiences. If students don't understand something, just saying it over and over again isn't going to help. You have to approach the problem in a different way.

Use multiple sources for your lecture notes. You want to provide your students with different ways of looking at things but you don't want to confuse them unnecessarily. If your textbook uses a set of definitions and notations and you use different ones in class, you're going to confuse your students. The goal is to present different examples than the textbook has, but to maintain consistency with the text.

Tying topics in with those of other CS classes can be helpful. In particular, this helps students generalize concepts. So if you're teaching concurrency in operating systems, you can also discuss how that same issue comes up in database systems. It is also useful to incorporate references and experiences from outside the department. Making analogies to real world concepts is one way--like talking about lines at the bank or the grocery store when you're talking about queuing theory. Discuss the applications of computer science topics. Many undergraduates get started in the program and just keep going from course to course without really knowing much about what you can do as a computer scientist. Sometimes they're seniors by the time they start thinking about what kinds of jobs they can get. Tell them about how what they're learning can apply to different jobs. This will excite them and reinforce their initial interest. Arrange for guest lecturers from other departments to come in. This will give the students a different perspective on the topic and again tie in some things that they might be learning in another class in another department. Invite a psychologist to an AI class, a linguist to a Programming Languages class, or an economist to a Software Engineering class.

It can be very effective in teaching to provide opportunities for students to generalize and discriminate among concepts--to take things that are in different situations and find what's in common and what's different among them. In addition, you want to motivate your students to be active learners. Get them to be interested in the material. If you can convince them that they are looking for answers to questions that they think are important, they will find them. No matter how good a lecturer you are, the student won't learn if the he or she doesn't want to learn. So you must also try to provide different conditions in which they can become motivated.

Sometimes a student is motivated but is also dealing with conflicts and frustrations in understanding the material. Try to recognize this and provide avenues for them to get around it.

One problem that professors inevitably deal with is handling questions in class. You will learn that--despite all of your preparation in organizing your lectures, conquering the fear of facing a hundred students, and earnestly trying to interest them--the students will ask questions that you will not have an on-the-fly answer for. Don't be afraid to say,"I don't know"--that is a wholly appropriate response. You do, however, want to come to the next lecture with the answer. Also, make sure you and the rest of the students understand the question before you answer.

Finally, a very important teaching strategy is to provide an atmosphere of cooperation between you and the students. If you have the attitude that you're doing your job of preparing the lecture and it is up to the students to learn the material if they want to or not, then you have probably created a basis for a very tense class. Knowing that you are interested in the students learning the material is conducive for the students to learn. Keep in mind that the tests are there for you to know if the class is catching on, and not a way to punish students who haven't caught on yet. You can't always be on "their side," but sometimes you can and should make an effort to do so when it's feasible.

4.2 SUGGESTIONS TO TRY

• Make effective use of the board. When you are explaining something and you make a few scattered scribbles on the board, a student who is not familiar with the material will not be able to take good notes or understand your point. Write legibly, put key concepts on the board, and make an effort to structure your notes across the board in a way so that you aren't constantly erasing information. And although your board notes are neat and succinct, sometimes they will necessarily get lengthy. In this case, prepare a handout beforehand. It's easy for people in a large lecture class to get confused by multi-board examples. In fact, if your programming example is more than four lines you should have a handout. You can use transparencies or multimedia presentations in lieu of the board.
• Prepare a course syllabus. Not only should your syllabus help the students with their scheduling, it should enumerate the topics to be discussed, their order, the number of exams, when they are, and the assignments. List the sources to be used in the class.
• Write learning objectives. This can be difficult and time-consuming but the pay-off is huge. Figuring out what the students' objectives for learning in your course means that you have to look at the subject you're teaching, analyze the subject, and find the specific points you consider essential in comprehending the subject. One way to use these objectives is to hand them out with your syllabus and use the list as a signpost, e.g., the first thirteen objectives are what's going to be on the first test, etc. In order to write these objectives you have to consider what abilities the students will come to class with. Consider also what the goal of the class is--what the purpose of learning the subject matter of the class is. You may be surprised to find the sources you planned to draw from have lots of material that is irrelevant to the objectives you've come up with. Consequently, you can throw that superfluous material out. The students have their own learning objectives that range from low-level learning (e.g., memorization of facts) to high-level learning (e.g., comprehension of concepts); by providing a list of objectives you have the opportunity to encourage the pursuit of high-level goals. The results of having clear objectives will be a focused class with fewer confused students.
• Stifle monotony in your lectures. You can actively raise the energy level of your lectures by involving the students in some activity. Try a one-minute concept paper where the students write down what they understand and don't understand about a concept you've covered. Or have a brainstorming session. Incorporating writing exercises and spontaneity into a lecture will benefit students by keeping them interested and by working on their communication skills.
• Have review sessions. Running review sessions before exams and quizzes can be enormously useful for your students. These sessions should be held independent of lectures because you usually have too much material to cover during the lecture to fit in review time. Review sessions help students organize their studying and give them insights into what kinds of problems you are thinking about and what might be on the test.
• Be as organized as possible. Even a little chaos can hurt. If you skimp on one lecture and just throw something together, you'll wind up spending loads of time cleaning up the aftermath: students emailing you for clarification and students waiting outside your office door. You'll spend more time "fixing" the lecture or assignment by answering individual queries than it would have taken to set it up right in the beginning. Also, have your extra reserve materials ready in the library at the beginning of class.
• Be positive. Concepts should be reinforced, and positive reinforcement is better than negative reinforcement. There is a tendency in certain situations to give negative reinforcement--in grading, in particular. For example, a 10-point test question is usually graded "-3" instead of "+7." This is because it is easier for people to think in these terms. You can compensate for this by putting a few check marks or "good" remarks here and there where appropriate.

5. HOMEWORK AND TESTS

5.1 STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING PROBLEMS

Coming up with good problems for homework assignments and tests can be difficult. It is important to have a mix of problems. Promote cooperative problem solving as well as individual problem solving. Assignments should have a mix of group problems and individual problems. Include some essay questions as well as programming assignments; communication skills are extremely important but undervalued in computer science. You also want to avoid giving tests that are made up of basic knowledge questions. Students can easily spit back information without understanding concepts. Open-ended problems that require the creative application of the class's concepts will produce answers from the students that really show you whether or not the students understand the material.

5.2 PROJECT COURSES

Project courses are a little different from pure lecture classes. The important thing in a project class is to refrain from assigning a monolithic project to a group of undergraduates and expect them to turn it in at the end of the term. This would surely result in many people not knowing how to get started, and some people not finishing the project at all. Break long-term projects into logical pieces and guide the students through these--particularly the beginning pieces. When you have realistic timetables you aid the students in managing their own schedules and you don't overwhelm them.

Projects are also a good means by which students practice their communication skills. Your students will learn how to communicate strategy and design when you require oral presentations of the projects. Having them document their projects will also help. Good oral and written communication skills are valuable on all career paths.

5.3 TESTS

Before you give tests you need to find out how long to make the tests. You don't want to give them tests that are impossible to complete within the 60 or 90 minute time constraints of the class. One way to find out is to give short quizzes. If you prepare a ten-minute quiz and the students take 40 minutes, you know you need to either cut down on the number of questions or use problems that don't take so long to solve.

You have four main objectives when you give tests. First, you want to force the students to study the material. Students are easily inspired to study material when they know they're going to be tested on it. Second, the test itself is educational. If you state on the test that the student is expected to use three concepts to solve a particular problem, the student will work to that end and, in the process of doing so, will probably emerge from taking the test with a little more insight into making the concepts work together. Third, you want to gauge how the individual is doing so that you can give appropriate grades. Last, you are giving tests so that you can gauge where the class is in understanding the materials. If a significant fraction of the class missed a question, you know you didn't explain it clearly enough.

5.3.1 ALTERNATIVES TO THE STANDARD TEST

Since you are giving tests not only to test the students' knowledge but also to teach them about applying individual concepts to a larger-scale picture, consider giving tests that reflect this objective. Take-home tests are one possibility. Many professors shy away from giving take-home tests because of the possibility of cheating, but if you balance a take-home test with good homework assignments and a standard final, you will find out who's been cheating and who hasn't.

Another type of test you can use is the collaborative test. Let pairs of students work on the test together. Not all of your tests can be collaborative, of course; you still need to give individual grades. But giving the students an opportunity to interact with one another during a test will ensure that both students will learn something. Allowing collaboration also reinforces the need to learn how to work with others--a trait that is highly regarded in industry. Remember that these students have been focusing on becoming individualistically competitive and now have to switch gears.

5.3.2 GRADES

Assigning grades is difficult to do--grades always mean a lot to students, it's hard to be fair, and it's particularly difficult to be consistent when you first begin to teach because you've never done it before. Set some standards for yourself and try to keep them. The most important standard to define is what qualifies as a passing grade in your class. At the end of the term--when you've totaled up all of the homework, quiz, and test scores--you need to figure out who passes. Of course, who gets the A's and B's is very important to the student, but ultimately you need to be aware of how much of the material in your class you expect your students to learn in order for them to pass. Also, when you give grades you should only consider the student's performance in your class. It is easy to be swayed by the knowledge of circumstance, but grades are indicators of the students' proficiency in the subject matter and should not be distributed on the basis of your compassion for a student on the verge of getting kicked out of school or losing a scholarship. Many professors come up with some grading guidelines that they include in the syllabus.

6. SAVING TIME

Contact faculty at other universities. Utilize available resources; looking over other professors' syllabi for courses you are teaching can be very helpful. TAs are another invaluable resource. If the department isn't giving you enough resources, be aggressive and ask for more. Recycle old questions from year to year. Lecture preparations consume a lot of time. Teaching the same course for several years successively will cut down on your preparation time considerably, and you will learn the material well. Teach courses that support your research. Don't be too ambitious; cramming lots of material into one course doesn't necessarily mean that the students will be able to assimilate all of that material.

Although using open-ended examination questions is a good way to gauge how well your students are learning, you don't want to wind up creating a bigger problem for yourself by developing questions so open-ended and unfocused that you spend an enormous time grading each individual test. Refine your questions so that the answer will go in the right direction.

Keep in mind that you don't need to grade every assignment. The purpose of the homework is to give the students practice in working with the concepts. Let the TAs grade the work. You still need to participate in part because the assignments will tell you how well the students understand the material. Grading homework and tests also give you the opportunity to refine your questions.

7. CHEATING

Cheating, unfortunately, happens, and there aren't any surefire methods to stop it. There are, however, some strategies you can use to control the opportunity students have to cheat. One strategy is to have open-book exams. This will confound students who are tempted to use cheat-sheets and the like. The downside of open-book exams is that it puts the burden on you to create harder problems. Again, integrative problems that require creative problem solving are ideal. To save time in preparing your assignments you might want to reuse questions that you've refined over the years; this can be a useful technique, but be aware that students will network and get a hold of old tests and homework. Remember that students are usually under a lot of pressure and some will give in to using that information. Modeling some exam problems after homework problems will distinguish whom actually did the homework problems from who didn't. Cheating on programming assignments is a little harder to foil; these days text processors facilitate the changing of variables and indentation. If a bizarre programming error shows up in two assignments out of forty, though, it's obvious that the students--at the very least--discussed the design of their program. Anticipate these sorts of situations and decide on a course of action based on departmental and university policies, as well as your own feelings. Explain the consequences of cheating to your students so they know what to expect. You can also discuss cheating with people in your department; sometimes there will be a general philosophy about how to deal with illegal collaboration.

8. A FEW CLOSING REMARKS

Make an effort to be considerate and respectful to your students. Be true to yourself. Maintain a reasonable pace for both you and your students. Recognize that you both have lives outside of school. Capitalize on your strengths and adjust your weaknesses. Everybody has both; the trick is to communicate with your students to find out what is working, to take their evaluations seriously, and to improve your course.